Your weekly vocabulary lesson: 7 tech terms you need to know

If you grew up during or after the monumental dot-com bubble of the late-nineties and early two-thousands and spend all of your time on the internet like some people do (me), you likely have at least a working knowledge of the terminology that inhabits discussions about contemporary technology.

A lot of people, though, didn't pick up the vocabulary for one reason or another. Those people are often excluded from some conversations just because the language is so obscure.

This is to our detriment. The more people that are in on the discussion, the better off we are.#bhamtech is for everyone.

I've decided to put together an ongoing list of vocabulary words for our discussion. When and if I unwittingly use some strange internet jargon that flies over your head, make sure you call me out on it and I'll include it in the next installment.

Here's 7 tech terms you should know:

Cloud:

This one trips a lot of people up, which is strange because most people today operate a lot, if not all the time, "in the cloud."

"The cloud" is just another word for the huge network of computers that make up the internet. When you are on the internet, you are actually talking to other computers all over the world.

Cloud computing just means that the service you are using resides on a separate computer than the one you are holding. Most of the action is actually happening out on the internet rather than on your device.

For instance, services such as Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, Tinder, etc are actually happening on the internet. You don't have the movies on your laptop or television, Netflix has the movies and you pay to access them. They are somewhere else: they're in the cloud.

Startup:

"Everyone knows what a startup is!", you may exclaim. I don't think that's necessarily the case, though. There's not even a sturdy consensus on how to spell it.

The definition, as you might guess, is fairly broad. However, there are a handful of identifying factors that you can look out for:

A startup is distinct from just a new business in that they are generally have an original product or service they are bringing to market.Grounds for competition between firms is generally on the presentation of the end product or service rather than on price. For instance, how easy, practical, efficient, or scalable the product or service is. This means that innovation, rather than cost-cutting, is paramount.

There isn't really a size at which a company is no longer a startup, but once the company either merges with or is bought by another company, they can no longer be considered a startup.

App Developer:

"App" stands for 'application'. An application is a program designed to run on a computer of some kind. Usually, when we talk about "Apps" we're talking about programs that run on mobile handheld devices like smartphones and tablets.

An app developer is someone who works on the design and testing of a new application to ready it for market.

Experienced app developers, especially in the Birmingham area, are in high demand right now.

SaaS:

First of all, SaaS stands for 'software as a service'.

Most proprietary software is licensed in some way to you. That is, there is a legal framework around your using of the software. You generally agree to this framework when you scroll quickly to the bottom of the "Terms and Conditions" pop-up and click the check box for "I agree". Those terms and conditions effectively say that you are not going to reproduce, repackage, or resell the software (Or so I'm told, I don't read them either). When you buy your copy of Microsoft Word, for instance, you don't actually own the software. All you've purchased is the legal right to use Microsoft's software.

SaaS is a different kind of licensing model. In this model, instead of buying individual licenses on disks, you generally pay a subscription to use a service available on the internet. Fleetio is a great example of SaaS licensing.

SaaS is the legal structure around cloud computing, which we discussed above,

Bootstrapped:

This is a business term that was stolen from a computing term which was stolen from a cowboy term. Welcome to the English language.

The term bootstrapped, when you're discussing startups means that they are not funded by a third party. All of their funding comes from the flow of internal revenue. After overhead is covered, whatever is left goes into growing the business. A lot of the time, bootstrapped companies and their owners have a certain swagger that they've definitely earned. It's hard to succeed in the world of tech startups. It's even harder when you have no outside help.

Funded:

Even with their swagger, most companies would prefer to have third party investors in their ideas. You hear about these investors all the time on the news. The funding is often referred to as Venture Capital. These are high risk investors that seek out promising startups in which they can invest. Returns are generally in the form of ownership equity. Investment like this is what drives fast growth. We have a fair amount of investment in Birmingham annually, $2 billion last year. Compare this, though, to the investment in Silicon Valley in the year 2000: $105 billion.

Incubator Program:

Innovation Depot, which I have mentioned a lot in the last couple of weeks, is Birmingham's largest Incubator Program. They are a central work space that many startups can use in order to lower the costs generally associated with stating a business.

For instance, all of the companies in an incubator may share copy/print services, shipping services, IT services, and so on. Business incubators are generally funded (at least initially) by a mixture of municipal, private, and university investment.